UC service workers deserve livable wages

Dana Frank

Published
4:00 am PDT, Thursday, July 17, 2008

Yet another scandal is erupting at the University of California. Rich UC executives are denying decent, livable wages to the 20,000 workers who clean the university's toilets, serve its food, and clean its bedpans. And when those workers have resorted to a strike to try to use their basic civil rights to do something about the situation, the university has gotten yet another nasty legal injunction to try and stop them.

In the UC system, Local 3299 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees represents 20,000 service and patient care workers at all 10 campuses, including the UCLA and UCSF Medical Centers. Since bargaining began in August, 2007, the workers have been pleading with UC to pay them decent wages. Current wages are 25 percent below those paid to comparable community college workers.

UC's wages are so low that approximately 96 percent of all UC service workers are eligible for food stamps, WIC, or some form of public assistance. At UC Santa Cruz, I know workers who have been cleaning dormitories in the middle of the night for more than 15 years, and still make only $14 an hour - with no prospect of a raise, despite the stratospheric prices of housing, gas and food. These workers work two, three, or four jobs, moonlighting in gas stations, washing dishes, or watching other people's children. They rarely see their own.

Yet UC executives still refuse to offer any guaranteed raise at all to most service workers. They won't give them a meaningful merit increase system, either. Just as bad, they're refusing to lock in workers' payments into the health care and pension systems, so that UC is free to let those fees skyrocket in the future whenever and however it wants.

How do these executives sleep at night? Do they think UC's service workers are somehow lesser human beings who don't deserve to go home at night and see their children?

Reluctantly, after months of trying to get UC negotiators to move, after trying every other strategy they can think of, UC's desperate service workers decided to strike throughout the state system, beginning July 14. Patient care workers aren't striking, but many are respecting picket lines.

UC's response, for the second time, was to scurry to a judge and get a legal injunction barring the workers from striking. UC argued that the union didn't give "adequate" notice before its strike; therefore it's acting "in bad faith" and refusing to negotiate. But there's no actual law defining "adequate notice" in the public sector. And the union did - as a courtesy - officially notify UC with five days' warning. The union, though, never even got a chance to present its counter-arguments before the judge.

It's UC that's got the corner on bad faith. Once again, it's spending tens of thousands of dollars getting expensive anti-union law firms to invent the law in UC's favor. By attacking the union with an injunction, UC is reverting to a draconian and long-outdated weapon from the late 19th Century, when employers had judges in their pockets and used them to unilaterally slap down injunctions against striking. UC is trying to deny the American workers' basic First Amendment right to strike - upheld by the Supreme Court's 1939 Thornhill decision, which affirmed that picketing was free speech.

Meanwhile, UC executives, wallowing in their half-a-million-dollar salaries, are using the state budget crisis to mask their own greed. There's plenty of money around for anti-union lawyers and PR spin. And there's enough money to pay the most bloated salary of all: $940,000 in total compensation for new President Mark Yudof. As state-appointed fact-finder Carol Vendrillo put it, "it is not the lack of state funding but the university's priorities" that have put service workers' wages at the bottom.

Let's hope President Yudof is brave enough to end UC's moral corruption and immediately grant union members a decent wage and lock in their benefits.

One thing's for sure: Union members are being magnificently brave in defying UC's corrupt injunction. Thanks to UC, the workers are so poor and so desperate, they have no choice but to disrupt the university to which they're giving their life's work. That's the real scandal.